Veganism is a privilege
Partly fair: choice is unevenly distributed. But the cheapest staples in most markets are plant foods, and the argument is usually made by people with full access.
Eating vegan takes more than a willingness to skip meat: it takes time to cook from scratch, a kitchen and somewhere to store food, shops nearby that stock the right things, and the headspace to plan meals around nutritional gaps. People working long hours, living in food deserts, or feeding a family on very little cannot easily rebuild their diet around a moral ideal, and for them cheap animal products are often the most reliable, filling food within reach. Presenting veganism as a simple ethical obligation ignores those constraints and ends up casting the people with the fewest options as moral failures.
There is something to this. Time, cooking facilities, storage, nearby shops and the mental capacity to plan are all unevenly distributed, and someone working two jobs without a kitchen faces constraints that someone with a car and a full fridge does not.
The food itself is not the privileged part. Dried pulses, rice, oats, potatoes and seasonal vegetables are among the cheapest foods available in most markets, and meat is historically and currently a marker of relative affluence: in much of the world, plant-based eating is the default that rising incomes move people away from. Where the argument becomes a deflection is in its usual application: invoked by someone who faces none of those constraints, about people who are not part of the conversation.
Introducing a point that is not relevant to the question under discussion, drawing attention away from it rather than answering it.
How it applies here: The constraints facing people with limited access are offered as a reason bearing on the choices of someone who has full access. They do not bear on them.
Replacing someone's actual position with a weaker, distorted version, then refuting that instead. The original argument is left untouched.
How it applies here: Treats the position as a demand that everyone everywhere adopt it immediately, which the standard formulation explicitly declines to make.